10.21.2016

On the presidential ballet this November,
there is no morally acceptable candidate. A vote for Hillary or Trump is
a vote for a morally unacceptable leader, an assent to the decision of a nation
whose capacity for moral (good) decision making is broken. There is a point,
and we have reached it here, when participating in a “lesser of two evils”
political calculation is unacceptable. Good people must unite, and must
unite in saying that this is wrong, that this isnot good enough.
A vote is always a compromise, but there is a point when the compromises
required to vote cause us to abandon fundamental moral commitments. And
abandoning our basic commitments, for whatever perceived political calculus,
is anathema to any person of sound conscience, and perhaps more significantly,
our democracy.

There is present in the arguments
for Trump a fatalism, an assent to the liberal view of government: a
belief that this election and retention of the office of the presidency is all
that matters, that it is our best hope for salvaging what is left of Christian
culture and law. But this is untrue. The presidency is but one
office in our republican government. The president is not yet
our King. There are other avenues for enacting good law. There will be
other elections, there will be other presidents. By abstaining from
voting for the office of the president, I will be able to stand before my
fellow countrymen and say with total honesty that I rejected the evil choice
with which I was presented in the year 2016.

I encourage all fellow Christians, and
men and women of good will, to do the same.

10.08.2016

Trump needs to step down. Get out of the race. Get out of politics, get out of the American public's eye, go away. Shame on the Republican party and shame on all Trump's supporters. This man is a national disgrace.

10.07.2016

Over the past half century, the Reagan years notwithstanding, our ruling class’s changing preferences and habits have transformed public and private life in America. As John Marini shows in his essay, “Donald Trump and the American Crisis,” this has resulted in citizens morphing into either this class’s “stakeholders” or its subjects. And, as Publius Decius Mus argues, “America and the West” now are so firmly “on a trajectory toward something very bad” that it is no longer reasonable to hope that “all human outcomes are still possible,” by which he means restoration of the public and private practices that made the American republic. In fact, the 2016 election is sealing the United States’s transition from that republic to some kind of empire.

Electing either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump cannot change that trajectory. Because each candidate represents constituencies hostile to republicanism, each in its own way, these individuals are not what this election is about. This election is about whether the Democratic Party, the ruling class’s enforcer, will impose its tastes more strongly and arbitrarily than ever, or whether constituencies opposed to that rule will get some ill-defined chance to strike back. Regardless of the election’s outcome, the republic established by America’s Founders is probably gone. But since the Democratic Party’s constituencies differ radically from their opponents’, and since the character of imperial governance depends inherently on the emperor, the election’s result will make a big difference in our lives.

Pretentious Precepts

"First Things means, first, that the first thing to be said about public life is that public life is not the first thing. First Things means, second, that there are first things, in the sense of first principles, for the right ordering of public life."

“A free society cannot survive if we are so free that nothing is expected of us.”